A NEW ASTRONOMY 203 



A little later Francis Bacon writes : 



' In the system of Copernicus there are many and grave difficulties ; 

 for the threefold motion with which he encumbers the earth is a serious 

 inconvenience, and the separation of the sun from the planets, with 

 which he has so many affections in common, is likewise a harsh step ; 

 and the introduction of so many immovable bodies into nature, as when 

 he makes the sun and the stars immovable, the bodies which are pecul- 

 iarly lucid and radiant, and his making the moon adhere to the earth 

 in a sort of epicycle, and some other things which he assumes, are 

 proceedings which mark a man who thinks nothing of introducing fic- 

 tions of any kind into nature, provided his calculations turn out well/ 



Bacon himself was very ignorant of all that had been done by 

 mathematics ; and, strange to say, he especially objected to astronomy 

 being handed over to the mathematicians. Leverrier and Adams, 

 calculating an unknown planet into a visible existence by enormous 

 heaps of algebra, furnish the last comment of note on this specimen 

 of the goodness of Bacon's view. . . . Mathematics was beginning 

 to be the great instrument of exact inquiry ; Bacon threw the science 

 aside, from ignorance, just at the time when his enormous sagacity, 

 applied to knowledge, would have made him see the part it was to play. 

 If Newton had taken Bacon for his master, not he, but somebody else, 

 would have been Newton. De Morgan. 



Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark* 

 places of nature in the way that one stupendous mind subsequently 

 did but still, as we look back through the long vista of the history 

 of science, the dim Titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself 

 out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that over- 

 shadow them, and catches the first gleam of the rising sun, . . . 



Like some iron peak, by the Creator 



Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn. 



E. J. C. Morton. 



TYCHO BRAKE (1546-1601). The first great need of the new 

 Copernican astronomy adequate and accurate data was soon 

 to be supplied by Tycho Brahe, bom in 1546 of a noble Danish 

 family. While a student at the University of Copenhagen his 

 interest in astronomy was enlisted by an eclipse, and later, at 

 Leipsic, he persisted in devoting to his new avocation the time 



